Download Attachments from Multiple Gmail Threads

One of our clients over at Tempest Media likes sending images by embedding them in email messages instead of attaching them or zipping them up and uploading to a file sharing service like Dropbox or Google Drive. Since they’re an important client I didn’t want to inconvenience them by asking them to change their file sharing method. However, I didn’t want to manually download the embedded images from multiple threads so I wrote a Google Script to do just that.

Instructions

Here’s how to run it.

  1. Star the threads/conversations in your Gmail whose attachments you want to be saved.
  2. Run the script by clicking this link.
  3. After you click the link, sign in to Google (if you haven’t already done so) and give it permissions to access Gmail. It will get the attachments from a maximum of ten starred threads and create a zipped file named downloadAttachments.zip that will be saved to your Google Drive.

I also uploaded the code to a Github Repository for my Google Apps Scripts. Currently, this is the only script there.

Limitations

Current Version: 1

  • Limited to 10 starred conversations/threads
  • Does not check duplicate filenames, but to prevent errors, will append a sequential number in the format “n_” before the filenames in the zip file